Bloody Harlan

Hard Times in the Kentucky Coal Mines

The first fifty years of Aunt Molly's life, from 1880–1930, coincided
with Appalachia's transition from an agrarian-based economy to one dependent
on the mining industry. Lured by the region's rich seams of bituminous coal
and other coal sources, outside investors purchased rights to the valuable
land, and eventually the region's impoverished residents found themselves
beholden to these out-of-state developers who owned their countryside.

Aunt Molly witnessed the period in which Appalachian farmland was replaced
with mining camps for mineworkers; soon these settlements sprouted into
whole company towns. Tucked away in the rural mountains and secluded from
the outside economy, these communities were built and maintained by the
company mine owners; there were no elected officials. Residents of coal
towns were captives of the company, forced to endure squalid housing and
unhealthy and dangerous working conditions. Miners were required to use
scrip to shop at the company store (usually the only store for miles around)
and to send their children to the company town schoolhouse. They were trapped
in a paternalistic relationship with the mine owners and operators, and
dependent on their benevolence.

When the coal industry was booming, most miners survived well enough to
permit this dysfunctional relationship to continue with relatively little
complaint—since workers rumored to be union members found themselves
out of a job and excluded from the community. During the 1920s, however,
decreased demand for coal and competition from other fuel sources resulted
in a downward turn for the industry; miners and their families suffered
the consequences. In the face of national economic crisis, mine owners were
forced to reduce operational costs by cutting hours and wages.

The arrival of the Depression made the situation unbearable, and miners
were increasingly receptive when labor organizers arrived to establish unions
for the workers. The United Mine Workers of America had been active in the
Harlan County area as early as 1917, and intermittently active in the 1920s.
In 1931, they turned their attention again to the miners in Kentucky.

Also at this time, the National Miners Union (NMU) arrived in the coal
counties to promote a communistic brand of labor organization. Convening
rallies and dispensing food and clothes to the impoverished miners, the
NMU converted many miners, including Aunt Molly and the Garland family.
When the region's conservative mining families discovered the atheistic
and "red" nature of NMU ideology, however, support for that union
dwindled.

Listen to Aunt Molly's song "I Am a Union Woman":

When I was organizing the miners around Bell and Harlan Counties in
19 and 31, I sang this song. I used it in my organizational work; I always
sung this before giving my speech. In those days it was "Join the NMU.'
But later on, John Lewis started a real democratic organization, so I changed
it to 'Join the CIO.' -- Aunt Molly

Harry Simms

Harry Simms was a National Miners Union organizer from Birmingham, Alabama,
who came to Kentucky to help the striking miners. He was shot and killed
by gun thugs near Pineville, Kentucky, on his way to meet members of the
Waldo Frank Committee, a group of writers who visited the region in February
1932 to distribute food and clothing to the embattled miners.

Simms, only nineteen years old, was a member of the Young Communist League
and a good friend of Aunt Molly's brother, Jim Garland. Garland spoke at
the funeral in New York City in front of 25,000 mourners; when he returned
to Kentucky he composed a song about the tragic death of his murdered friend.
Aunt Molly would later claim to share credit for the ballad's lyrics:

Harry Simms was a young Jewish organizer who was murdered on Brush
Creek, Knot County. He was walking along the railroad track with another
fellow--they were going down to meet some writers who came to Bell County
to study the conditions of the miners--when the gun thugs shot him. They
took him and the other fellow back to town. They put the other fellow in
jail.

They left Harry sitting on a rock in front of the town hospital with
a bullet in his stomach. He sat there on that rock an hour or more with
his hands on his stomach bleeding to death. He was sitting there because
the hospital wouldn't take him in till somebody guaranteed to pay his bill.
After a while a man said he would pay the bill so they took Harry in. But
it was too late. This song was composed right after that in 1932 by me and
my brother Jim Garland.